-By Warner Todd Huston
There is a big argument being waged between Trumpeters who say he is utterly innocent for the violence constantly occurring at his rallies and those who say it is all his fault because of his bellicose rhetoric. The truth is, Ted Cruz is right. It isn’t an either or, it’s a little of both.
To start out, I don’t want to say that the violence being whipped up by your Move-On, George Soros, Occupy-type leftists are justified. Nor is it dismissible. The protests we are seeing over the last month at Trump rallies are not spontaneous bands of local citizens upset about Donald Trump. They are organized, anti-American agitators who are using Trump to foster anarchy.
These people have been around for decades. They are the same people who peopled the failed Occupy Wall Street “movement,” the same type of people who helped organize the 1968 Chicago convention riots, the same who have organized unrest, destruction, race hatred, and attacks all across the country since the anarchist craze started at the turn of the last century. They are all of a piece, all un-American, all hateful of our system and history.
Further, none of this violence would be happening at Trump rallies if they were not organizing ahead of time and making efforts to invade Trump rallies in order to try and foster violence.
And before I go on I should say that the leftists perpetrating violence at these rallies are not to be excused for what they are doing. They are wrong. Their actions–even if expected–are wrong.
However, there is a reason these people aren’t targeting Cruz or Rubio or Kasich or any of the other candidates before them. It is because Trump has invited them with his own bellicose rhetoric.
You see, free speech is free, yes, but one also must be prepared for the consequences of his free speech. We all have every right to say what we want but we do not have the right to expect to be free from the consequences of our free speech.
You have every right in the world to call you boss at work and ass hole. And he has every right to fire you for it. You have every right to say you’d like to punch someone in the face. But you don’t have the right to expect that person not to get angry back and make some sort of response. “Fighting words” is a legal doctrine for a reason, after all.
We have a perfect example of consequences outside of this Trump situation.
Remember when the country trio the Dixie Chicks began to go around to concerts in Europe and began denouncing the U.S.A. when George W. Bush was President? Yes, they had every right to say whatever they wanted to say. But there were consequences for their actions. They lost their fans by the millions. And those disaffected fans then pressured country radio stations to stop playing Dixie Chicks records on the air. And country stations all across the U.S. listened to their fans and pulled Dimpy Chimps records in droves.
Was this a violation of the Dimpy Chimps’ free speech? Nope. They still had every right to say what ever the wanted to say, but fans had the corresponding right to stop buying their albums and to pressure local radio stations to stop playing them. You see? The Dimpy Chimps lost their careers because free speech has consequences.
And just as in that non-violent case above, Trump brought some of the left’s attention down on to himself by his bellicosity, his off handedness, and his underlying violent rhetoric on the stump. By yelling to security to “get them outta here,” by his bravado about what he’ll “do” to people, and now by his claim that he may even pay the legal fees of is fan who cold cocked a protester in the face, Trump has made himself a target of replies in kind.
So, yes, it is the protesters’ fault for being violent, and no there is no excuse for their actions. But Trump simply is NOT 100 percent innocent, here.
Ted Cruz was exactly right when he said, “Now, the responsibility for that lies with protesters who took violence into their own hands. But in any campaign responsibility starts at the top. Any candidate is responsible for the culture of the campaign. And when you have a campaign that disrespects the voters, when you have a campaign that affirmatively encourages violence, when you have a campaign that’s facing allegations of physical violence against members of the press, you create an environment that only encourages this sort of nasty discord.”
At some level, with his bellicosity, Trump bears some responsibility for the violence at his rallies. You can’t fan flames of hate a violence, then act wide-eyed and innocent when hate and violence occurs.
Lastly, self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders also has part of the blame, here. He has made a campaign out of telling his halfwitted followers that Republicans, capitalists, and traditionalists are responsible for keep them down. He has based his entire campaign on destroying American ideals and saying they are evil. As has clearly been seen at these riled Trump rallies, some of Bernie’s fans are there causing violence. So, the rhetoric coming from Sanders has also had its hand in driving this idiocy.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Federalist Papers, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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